


The Third Witness

by Hatteress (goddammitstacey)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 07x05, Coda, Episode Related, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-24
Updated: 2012-11-24
Packaged: 2017-11-19 09:47:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/571962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goddammitstacey/pseuds/Hatteress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester thinks he knows who Osiris will call as his third witness. He thinks wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Third Witness

Osiris had walked the earth a long time. Millennia, some would have said. He tended towards calling it, 'long enough'. Long enough to have seen the pain; the guilt; the utter self-loathing of humanity. He knew Sam Winchester thought him a monster for judging those few he did. Osiris wondered what the mortal would say if he knew just how easy Osiris had it, picking his victims. 

Throw a stone in any town square of any city in the world and you'd hit someone eating themselves away with guilt. Contrition was not an uncommon trait in humanity.

But this... This darkness Dean Winchester carried around - now that was something to behold.

Dean didn't just feel guilty, oh no - Dean _thrived_ on it. Here, before Osiris, was a man who had made the wet, sucking maw of self-loathing inside of him his greatest strength; the one thing that kept him going in the darkest of times.

Using it against him - sharpening that guilt to a razors edge and then gutting him with it... It was almost too easy. Osiris had barely made it through two witnesses before the walls had crumbled. It was fascinating in a way, watching Dean playact and bravado his way through his brother's last ditch effort to save him while inside, the man screamed. It was that, not his amusement at Sam's antics as he so claimed, that saw Osiris make the offer.

He may have been judgement, but he was not one for suffering. "Dean, do you want me to call my last witness?"

Osiris saw Dean's thoughts; saw who the man feared would appear next. It was almost laughable, the small spike of contrition attached to the act. The guilt was fresh but no...no not enough to have tempted Osiris.

Not enough to have utterly broken Dean Winchester.

Sitting here, watching Dean war with himself, Osiris knew that that's what this next witness would do if called. With it would surface all the rage; the sorrow; the endless, razor-wire _agony_ that Dean had worked so desperately to bury. In truth Osiris didn't blame him.

After all, living with the guilt of dragging an angel from heaven? A lesser man would have fallen to it long ago.

Dean Winchester though - Dean had crushed it down into a small, dark corner of himself - had tried to scrub this angel; this _Castiel_ \- from his mind in a desperate bid to keep moving; keep fighting.

He couldn't forget though, that much was obvious. Osiris saw into Dean's heart and knew that the man paused every time he opened the trunk of his car, knowing what was inside but unwilling to take the step to rid himself of it. Osiris also knew that Dean dreamed - on those nights he didn't drown himself in drink before sleep - of a jetty and the feel of one finger hooked through the cuff of a tan trenchcoat. 

It was a fascinating thing to behold, Dean's guilt finding it's way through the cracks in his denial. Cracks that might not have been there had guilt been the only thing Dean Winchester was living with at the loss of the angel Castiel.


End file.
